Formula 1’s carmakers have struck a breakthrough deal with the FIA on a new framework to govern the sport until 2012.

FIA president Max Mosley and Burkhard Goeschel, chairman of the Grand Prix Manufacturers Association – which previously threatened to break away from F1 and set up a rival championship – emerged from a meeting in Munich on Tuesday saying that agreement had been reached on all outstanding issues.

They confirmed that a new document is being drawn up to replace the existing Concorde Agreement, which expires at the end of next year...

The new agreement will govern the sport for “at least five years”, ITV Sport's F1 commentator James Allen reports in Wednesday's Financial Times.
Perhaps its most significant feature is a change to the decision-making process, which for years has been the subject of a fractious tug-of-war between the teams and the governing body.

In future individual teams’ management will relinquish their involvement and instead be represented by the manufacturers themselves, who will discuss prospective rules with the FIA at main board level.
Mosley and Goeschel also reaffirmed F1’s commitment to developing energy-efficient technology as part of a bold new agenda designed to make F1 more relevant to the road car industry and more environmentally responsible.
They pronounced the deal “a major breakthrough, unquestionably a fundamental change in the way we go about managing the rules.
“We defined the objectives of road relevance, lower costs and social relevance and then we defined the rules.”

Mosley has spoken before of his desire to see F1 at the cutting edge of ‘green’ technology, suggesting that in future engine power should be limited by energy consumption rather than capacity.
He wants manufacturers to divert their massive $US100m-plus R&D budgets into developing systems such as energy regeneration – whereby energy from braking is recycled to boost horsepower – rather than ploughing the money into established technologies for minimal performance gain.

He and Goeschel emphasised that the commitment to energy efficiency will be a core part of the new agreement.
“We will make research work in F1 more road-relevant,” the FIA president said.
“We will move F1 from the technology of the 20th century to that of the 21st century, to move away from F1 being labelled as a dinosaur.”
He added: “The tide of world opinion has just turned regarding global warming.
“With the changes we have made we have caught the tide; if we’d missed it F1 could have become irrelevant.”

The Munich deal raises the prospect of an end to the long-running and bitter disputes between F1’s rule-makers and competitors over governance and the distribution of the sport’s commercial revenues.
The crucial first step towards a rapprochement came at the Spanish Grand Prix last May, when Goeschel and Renault F1 president Alain Dassas brokered a new commercial deal with Bernie Ecclestone that secured a much larger slice of the cake for the teams.